Campus directory

The campus directory's one of those surprisingly critical projects, even if it's not the most glamorous. Finding the right person at a university with tens of thousands of staff and faculty, and hundreds of departments isn't easy, otherwise. The annual directory had two forms: a printed directory book, and an online directory. Each year, a different unit on campus would be featured on the cover.

It took years to convince the administration that a printed directory wasn't cost-efficient any longer, as the individual listings were out of date as soon as the book was printed. Also, each book became very expensive, because only a few departments were willing to pay for them and supply their entire staff, so the per unit cost went up. While you'd think that with an online directory site, there's no need for a physical book any more, that wasn't the case. After surveying all the departments on campus, we discovered that several departments on campus really did need physical copies of the department listing sections, but lacked ready access to a computer. As a compromise, I suggested that we make the needed sections of the directory available as PDFs online, for those departments to print out on their own, and that solved the problem.

The companion website for the online directory's fairly streamlined, simple, and uncluttered.